New DVD chronicles 2001 World Series

"World Series 2001"  How's this for fast turn-around time? The dust settled on one of the most exciting ever World Series a month ago, and Major League Baseball has a nice overview ready to stuff the Christmas stockings of sports fans.

The 84-minute documentary is loaded with player, coach and management interviews and a comprehensive look at the various pitching duels, occasionally explosive slugging of the Arizona Diamondbacks and oddly quiet bats of the New York Yankees  except in those pivotal ninth-inning rallies.

As a bonus, the DVD includes eight game-highlights features, including a breakdown of the wild closing game.

"Pearl Harbor"  Just in time to mark the 60th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor comes this sprawling, explosive yawn-fest.

The only thing the movie offers is expensive visual effects used to recreate the battle; stars Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale and Josh Hartnett are stuck in a lifeless story, woodenly spouting soap-opera dialogue.

The two-disc DVD set doesn't pack a big range of extras. The best bonus is the History Channel's "Unsung Heroes," an informative documentary account of Pearl Harbor. The making-of documentary is standard promotional fare. In it, Defense Department officials note that the military supported the production and allowed it to be shot at the scene of the attack because the Pentagon viewed the film as a testament to the victims and survivors.

The filmmakers say they strove to create a passionate fictional story to set against the historical attack and infuse the events with humanity. Better luck next time.

Included is the original theatrical version of the film and Crowe's "bootleg" cut, restoring 35 minutes of unreleased footage. The new material adds some colorful back-story on characters along with loads of snappy dialogue.

Crowe provides commentary along with a big ensemble of colleagues, friends and family, including his mom, who pops up in all his movies and was the basis for Frances McDormand's "Almost Famous" character.

The set has a cool interactive deleted scene in which McDormand's character reacts to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven;" Crowe didn't get the rights to use the song, so the DVD flashes a countdown for viewers to cue up their copy and play it while watching the scene.

The best two are collections of Disney shorts. "Mickey Mouse in Living Color" gathers 26 short cartoons from the 1930s starring the studio's main mascot. "Silly Symphonies" has 36 of Disney's short musical cartoons, including "Three Little Pigs" from 1933.

"Davy Crockett" features all five episodes of the Fess Parker frontier series that Disney aired in the 1950s. "Disneyland USA" is a bit of nostalgic Americana that's only for serious Disney devotees; it features various TV shows on the company's first mega-theme park, which opened in 1955.

"Britannia Hospital"  Not quite as weird as movies come, but close.

Lindsay Anderson reteams with Malcolm McDowell for this vicious satire depicting modern medicine as an indifferent institution that puts Frankenstein-like research ahead of patients' well-being.

"Britannia Hospital" was the third in Anderson's "Mick Travis" trilogy. McDowell also starred in the earlier two films, "If..." and "O Lucky Man."

The DVD has an interesting conversation with McDowell reminiscing about Anderson, who died in 1994.

"Made"  The guys from "Swingers" returned to action with this mob comedy starring Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, written and directed by Favreau and produced by the two of them.

Favreau, Vaughn and co-producer Peter Billingsley provide folksy audio commentary, with the two stars  close pals in real life  going at each other in somewhat more muted fashion than their squabbling characters do in the film. As a nice variation, the commentary can be accessed with video illustrations the threesome use to draw images on the screen to point out details, a la John Madden highlighting football replays.

Three featurettes give nice glimpses of the gaggle of friends Favreau and Vaughn had working on the film, along with how the team picked the eclectic songs on the soundtrack.

"Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas"  Last year's holiday blockbuster comes in a DVD-only version or in a deluxe model packaged in a book with pop-up recreations of three sets from the movie.

There's a good range of DVD extras, including nine minutes of deleted-extended scenes that are mostly chaff, but with a few cute sight gags. A blooper reel is mildly amusing when star Jim Carrey shifts from the Grinch's grouchy voice to his own.

The best bonuses are a couple of the behind-the-scenes featurettes on designing Whoville and its denizens and applying the elaborate makeup. Carrey discusses the difficulties of performing for three months buried in his Grinch getup.

Director Ron Howard, makeup artist Rick Baker and others on the film take viewers through the Whoville look from conception to finished product. Baker notes that the Whoville residents' features posed a fine line between the charming and grotesque, saying, "We didn't want to step over to the evil side."

"The Dirty Harry Series"  Clint Eastwood's steel-tough cop Harry Callahan, the way fans want him, in a boxed set with new digital transfers of all five films: "Dirty Harry," "Magnum Force," "The Enforcer," "Sudden Impact" and "The Dead Pool."

Appropriately, the DVD extras are strongest with the original film and trail off to virtually nothing for the final two movies, when the franchise was wearing itself out.

Behind-the-scenes documentaries for the first three films are dated but rather fun. The "Dirty Harry" disc has a slick new half-hour retrospective on the film series analyzing the character and his place in the action genre. "Magnum Force" writer John Milius notes that Harry "had no life except the hunt."

Arnold Schwarzenegger chimes in that the public was drawn to Harry because he was a lawman with an outlaw attitude. Eastwood remarks that Harry's harsh dispatching of criminals was a reaction against the times, when many thought there was too much emphasis on the rights of the accused and too little on the victims.

"The Matrix' Revisited"  A new "Matrix" film is a year or two away. In the meantime, here's a stopgap DVD loaded with materials looking back at the first film and ahead at the next two.

Sure, it's an advertisement for the upcoming movies. But for hard core fans, it's a solid look at this hip sci-fi world and where it's going.

"Prancer Returns"  The original "Prancer" debuted on DVD last month. Now comes this semi-sweet, passably entertaining sequel, about a boy who becomes caretaker to what he believes is one of Santa's reindeer.